Atlanta Journal-Constitution
January 8, 1999

by Catherine Fox

Visual Arts Tuscany, with a Cinematic Sensibility

What happens when memories of spaghetti westerns bump up against images of Chinese scrolls in the stew of an able artist's imagination?

In the case of the show of New York artist David Lowe's work at Solomon Projects, you get serene, rectangular views of the Tuscan landscape, the geometry of ageless buildings set in the gently rolling hills.

It's difficult to conceive of gunshots and galloping horses disturbing this quietude. Yet Lowe leaves the imprint of his cinematic muse, suggested by his naming these pieces after a Sergio Leone movie, in the way he frames scenes and fragments of scenes. He surrounds the delicately rendered landscapes with thick borders that somehow suggest eyes squinting through a camera's lens.

A couple of the pieces in the show are paintings, but the mixed-media drawings, a new medium for Lowe, are more interesting. Somehow the muted colors, matte as opposed to the shinier paint, the softness of the graphite marks and the papers, like old books, evoke more effectively a sense of time and place that is both present and distant.

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